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Tag Archives: Bullying

A few months ago, Bonnie Tsui wrote a piece over at Pacific Standarad on Facebook’s Compassion Research Day.

According to Tsui, the social media giant has brought together social scientists from across the Ivy League to help it better understand how people interact online.

Specifically, Facebook was concerned about anti-social social networking behaviour. How can users better communicate their dissatisfaction with unflattering pictures? How can we help teens cope with bullying?

On one level this is all great: Facebook fine tunes its tools so that users are better able to voice their concerns. However, I notice that the newly developed solutions usually involve deeper investment in Facebook: sending messages to other users, opening up conversations with other user.

“The changes have more than tripled the rate at which people send a message directly to another user asking for a photo to be removed. And of those requests, 85 percent of the…

In an open-floor office in the Philippines, an army of people stare at computers full of Whispers. There are 130 people to be exact, each skimming twenty posts at a time on their PC screens. They click and click and click, flagging Whispers here and there to be deleted or elevated to the company’s San Francisco team.

This is how content moderation works for the world of anonymous apps, and it all happens under the roof of one outsourcing firm called TaskUs. It’s labor intensive and it’s a massive, expensive endeavor. Whisper has used a TaskUs team in the Philippines for two years, since the company’s earliest beginnings, but now it’s not the only anonymous app doing so.

Gigaom has learned that Yik Yak, the lesser known anonymous app beloved by teens, began using TaskUs a few weeks ago and that Secret — under fire to explain how it will deal with…